María Dolores Braquehais
Vall d’Hebron University Hospital, Barcelona, Spain Immigration and Mental Health: Stress, Psychiatric Disorders and Suicidal Behavior Among Immigrants and Refugees. Hauppauge, New York: Nova Science Publishers, 2010, 350 pages.

The concern about the recent increase of behaviors related to a lack of self-control in industrialised and post-industrialised societies is linked to the old idea of achieving self-control, a preoccupation of all ethical and moral doctrines throughout the history. The term impulsivity started to be widely used to describe the failure to manage our impulses since the nineteenth century, when impulsivity was mainly studied as a pathological state. At the turn of the century, the psychoanalytical approach began to consider impulses as psyche’s drives. Since the mid twentieth century, due to the influence of statistics and behaviorism, impulsivity was studied as a personality trait. Nowadays, neurobiologists have tried to identify it with a failure of the brain “decision-making” circuitries and with the hypofunction of inhibitory neurotransmitters systems, mainly the serotonergic system.